Get Your Dungeon Crawl Fix With Desktop Dungeons

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Get Your Dungeon Crawl Fix With Desktop Dungeons

How many geek dads these days actually have time for a full-on dungeon crawl experience? Not this one, for sure. Between job, family, and the whip-cracking from the GeekDad.com editors to keep delivering thought-provoking, award-winning blog posts, I don't have enough time to take Level 1 Monster Bait and level him up to Level 15 Master of Swords. Or do I?

In between books, blog posts, changing diapers, and driving to t-ball practices, I've found a weekly (sometimes bi-weekly) fix called Desktop Dungeons. This little gem of a game promises fast rewards, even faster battles, and treasure galore... all in 10 to 20 minutes. And what's even better is that the alpha version of the game is 100% free to download and play. (And, surprisingly, the alpha version is fairly bug-free, as it's gone through a good bit of playtesting and updates.)

If Desktop Dungeons looks somewhat familiar, then you've likely played Rogue or any of the dozens of Rogue-clones sometime in the past, often referred to as Roguelikes. The big difference between most Roguelikes and Desktop Dungeons, however, is mainly found in the playtime. Rogue and its cousins were typically never-ending digital dungeon crawls that would go on and on and on... until you were killed or just beyond bored.

Not Desktop Dungeons – after playing the tutorial and getting familiar with the short list of rules, you'll be on your way to battling baddies, collecting potions and spells, and leveling up your character. What's unusual, however, is that all of this, including leveling up, is done in short bursts of play. You really can complete a dungeon in under 15 minutes. Sometimes less. Your goal is to defeat the highest level monster in the dungeon (usually level 10), but because the dungeons are randomly generated, there are times when you'll either find yourself blocked and unable to navigate around to easier monsters or simply out of health and mana (which you recover by exploring the dark areas of the dungeon or leveling up). If this happens, you simply click the Retire button – gold is carried over if you wish to try again (allowing you to buy some of the more expensive weapons and treasures for sale in random spots in a dungeon) – and try again.

There are plenty of tricks the developers have put into the game, and you'll stumble upon these as you play, frequently at the worst moments or at the most opportune. The game is addictive, and you'll find yourself going back and trying different classes and different races along with trying to unlock many of the hidden dungeons, races, and classes that remain unavailable until you achieve certain goals. (I'm still trying to finish a few of the harder quests so I can finally reach the 3-level Lothlorien Quest... argh.)

Should you find the free alpha version of the game enjoyable, do consider upgrading to the Full Version (not yet released at the time of this posting) and supporting these indie game developers - there are three tiers of support – $10, $20, and $75 (sold out, unfortunately). I've been enjoying the alpha version for some time, so I was more than happy to cough up the $20 to get a few extras such as a bonus class and a few more quests. All three support tiers provide access to the Full Version Beta when it's released... rumored to be near the end of July 2011. You'll also find the company has a great online community, with a wiki anddiscussion forum – tons of strategy can be gleaned from a few minutes (or hours) digging around.

I've enjoyed playing the alpha version, and I just can't wait for the Full Version to be released. I'm including a handful of images here from the alpha version and the Full Version so you can see how they compare. And, of course, do visit the game's main website for more details about the game, including news about its coming release.

Read on for an interview with one of the game's developers...

The Cape Town, South Africa QCF Design Team consists of Danny dislekcia Day, Rodain Nandrew Joubert, and Marc Aequitas Luck. QCF Design was founded back in 2007 by Danny, with Marc joining shortly thereafter; the two programmed bespoke games for various clients ranging from mobile game concepts for advertisers to social entrepreneurship ARGs for the World Bank Institute. Rodain rounded out the QCF trio by joining the team early in 2010 and bringing the Desktop Dungeons prototype with him.

Danny Day was kind enough to provide some additional information on the company and Desktop Dungeons (both alpha and full versions) that you can read below.

GeekDad: What was the inspiration behind the original Desktop Dungeons? Were there specific goals you had in mind when creating this game?

QCF Design: Rodain regularly disappears for a weekend and emerges bearing crazy prototypes and he had been playing a lot of Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup and one thing sort of led to another... He ended up emerging from one of those weekends bearing the very first version of Desktop Dungeons, set it loose on our community development forum and the rest is history. Rodain's always enjoyed roguelikes and as the game evolved we started having ideas that gelled with his initial concepts - I don't know where half of those "wouldn't it be cool if?" conversations came from.

GD: It's amazing that you can make this complex a game from Game Maker – was there any particular reason you chose Game Maker over a standard programming language like C?QCFD: I'm completely sincere when I say that Desktop Dungeons wouldn't have emerged at all if it had been important that it was written in C. People always ask why we're not using "something more powerful" and the answer is simple: We're CS majors, we can code in anything that has a reference, it comes down to picking the best environment and set of tools for the job. We can and do write low level engines when needed, it's just that Game Maker is astounding for creating and testing gameplay fast - ironically enough, people wouldn't give it such a hard time if it only gave you the GML scripting language, game loop and library of functions.

Why waste your time solving problems that have already been solved like collision testing and rendering optimizations when all the delicious, tricky, impossible gameplay that nobody's done before is out there to explore instead?

GD: Not having seen very early versions of the game, what kind of features have been added to the free alpha version over time?QCFD: I believe the first new feature that wasn't a class or balance change would have been worshiping gods at altars. Rodain used gods as a method to mess with the decisions that players would have available as they got used to the game, they ended up being quite possibly one of the biggest balance areas as the game progressed.

Looking back and playing older versions of DD, it's obvious how far the interface has come as well. First it was combat prediction and telling players if they'd die in the next hit or not, after that graphical indicators to make the game feel less "math heavy" as some players called it. At the same time Rodain was exploring the difficulty space of the game itself, creating harder and more complex dungeon "recipes" for players. Astoundingly, people kept rising to the challenges and managing to win somehow - I remember Rodain saying that the Lothlorien campaign concept was basically impossible. We heard of the first campaign clear about 2 weeks after it was released... There are few things that help you truly understand what makes a game tick like dedicated hardcore players.

Now of course we've moved on to adding features to the full version: the progression is completely different; there's actually a player inventory to manage now, so shop items can be converted too; the meta-game Kingdom is really fun, I think one of my favorite things that's made it into the latest version is the adventuring locker, which lets you store items from past dungeon runs and take them in with new characters for a fee.

GD: Is the alpha version .21 the final version of alpha or will you continue (once the full version is released) to occasionally release updates to it?QCFD: I don't think we'll update the alpha any more, no. Obviously we'll keep an eye out for improvements to GM for Mac (the lack of fullscreen capability still really bothers me) and we'll put out a native Linux build if GM ever goes there, but those will just be support versions, no new features. The original codebase is creaking quite alarmingly, some of the new things we're doing would be absolutely impossible in it. The rewrite has also made working on the game and adding content so much easier as well, we've got editors and in-house tools now, stuff we simply didn't have before.

There will be demos and free-to-play versions of the full, but I think the alpha has served above and beyond its original duty. We didn't expect to be able to get as many features out of it as we did.

GD: How and when was it decided to upgrade the alpha version to a more advanced graphics and sound version?QCFD: Quite early on, actually. We knew that we wanted to port DD to phones and that we were probably going to have to rebuild it at some point, so we started looking for tools that would let us hit as many platforms as possible. Unity ended up coming first in our tests, so we went with that. At the same time we were using the alpha to really refine the balance and gameplay, track down as many runaway feedback loops as possible, that sort of thing.

The focus was never on just upgrading graphics and sound, we were thinking about stuff we'd love to do with the game to make it more fun, more awesome to play. Then we sat down and designed a system that could tackle the sort of combinatorial complexity that Desktop Dungeons runs on and really kick that up a notch.

GD: Besides graphics and sound improvements, are there any special features found in the full version that are not included in the alpha version?QCFD: Oh, wow... Where to begin? I guess I'll start as the game loads then... Each profile has its own Kingdom now, a collection of buildings that the player spends their dungeon reward cash to upgrade. Different buildings do different things: some unlock the classes we know and love from the alpha, some provide access to new races and some have no analog in the alpha at all. We wanted players to choose how they approached the classes and this sort of upgrade system gave us the best way to do that.

Selecting a dungeon to explore sends you to a map screen, where you see which dungeons have active quests in them (you can manage your quests via the Tavern in the Kingdom) and decide which one you want to head to. After selecting your race and class from the buildings that unlock them, you get a chance to apply what we've called Preparations. Basically you get to spend gold up front to start a dungeon with better stuff, some initial enchantments or better information; think of it as investing in your future success. Individual Preparations are unlocked at specific buildings, some buildings have more possible Preparations than total slots for them, so your Kingdom is going to end up looking different to mine, depending on our individual play-styles and what we like to use. You might have a fully upgraded Blacksmith with damage boosting items, while I like the sneaky flexibility that the Witch's potions offer me and have got a level 1 Blacksmith that only sells the odd shield instead. Some players like having more scouting information, some like the Glyph magnet options, others like to gamble on getting a better reward IF they manage to take down the dungeon boss this run. There's a lot to explore, like any good roguelike.

In dungeons themselves, players will see the Inventory system, which makes for a lot more interesting item management decisions and ultimately more conversion opportunities. There are now sub-dungeons to explore, each offering either random side-quests, loot or just a particularly tricky challenge to overcome. Gods are re-balanced now,we've changed up the Glyphs everyone automatically converted... It's pretty much Desktop Dungeons 2 in all but name. That will, of course, be even better.

GD: Any tips for DD players who get stuck? What do you do when your health or mana are no longer charging and you've got more challenging monsters to fight? Start over?QCFD: Desktop Dungeons is about conserving resources. The healing and mana refill that you get when leveling up are a godsend - use them to cure yourself of mana burn or poison and try not to waste what you don't regenerate: if you can afford to cast a fireball but aren't going to need it to kill a monster and level up, cast it on your next target before you level, then you'll have less damage to do later.

Different character classes also have surprisingly different play-styles. Don't assume that you can play a Rogue exactly the same as a Fighter; it won't work. Try to play towards the strengths of each class and pick races that will complement them. At the same time, don't be afraid to experiment: Elf Berserkers are surprisingly awesome, for example.

And finally, don't worship gods willy nilly. That's a quick way to find yourself in a no-win situation as they shut off specific combos that you might have used to take down higher level enemies. If you can't beat a dungeon without turning to religion, hit up the DD forums and/or swap strategies with friends.

GD: Are there any hidden Easter Eggs in the alpha or full version that have been found? Any not found yet?QCFD: I'm sure you've realized that the game is full of references that Rodain's peppered about already, almost everything is a reference in some way or another. There aren't really hidden easter-eggs in the alpha though... Sure, not everyone has seen the high level shop items, so they don't know about the Orb of Zot or Amulet of Yendor, but those aren't expressly hiding from you. For a while the last boss in Lothlorien was a bit of a joke to find, but people found him and took him out, so that's what we get for making things "impossible." I'd love to say there's a secret goat level at the end of the gauntlet, but I'd be lying.

The full version does have some secrets though, but I'm obviously not about to spoil any of those just yet. Suffice to say that if you're looking for them, they're there.

GD: DD would make a perfect app for iOS or Android devices – any timeframe in mind for possible versions of DD for these devices?QCFD: That's pretty much exactly why we rebuilt the full version of the game in Unity. Everyone who played DD would ask when it would be available on their phones, so we couldn't ignore that. As soon as the PC/Mac version is out there, we'll already be hard at work on the new interface for touch screens and fixing the res issues... We've already prepared for it: picking up a Mac to deploy from late last year and Marc's recent phone upgrade was a Samsung Galaxy S, I got an iPhone 4 a couple months back. I'm hoping it'll only take a couple of months to port to phones after the PC version is finished.

GD: What other games do you have in store for us in the future? Any hints?QCFD: Tricky question. Right now we're 100% Desktop Dungeons 100% of the time. Obviously we've got hordes and hordes of games we really want to make, all you have to do is look at Rodain's previous prototypes and our Global Game Jam entries to see that we love posing What if? style gameplay questions and seeing what comes out of the asking.

I think we'll probably spend a good few months just randomly prototyping ideas again once Desktop Dungeons is playable on everything we can push it out for, literally just explore and see what sticks with players. The way Desktop Dungeons grew into a complete game is definitely something we enjoyed, if we can do that again we'll be very happy... What those prototypes will be is a different matter: we've got old concepts that have done well in past game jams or Microsoft contests that we've always wanted to finish - Youdunnit needs a phone version with randomly generated levels, SpaceHack is still a concept that I'd love to finish.

I don't think I could tell you what we're going to be working on a year from now though - we have too many ideas to finish at any one given time: Rodain's currently messing with a card game that rides the line between co-op and vs play. Marc wants to finish The Lost Fleet and talks about multiplayer emergence a lot. I'm curious to see what happens when you merge RTS and fighting games, or what a game that's built around thought processes looks like. Picking something to dedicate 2 years of our lives to is something that players do best.